Moment by moment he consulted his instruments and the chart he had stretched before him under the gleam of the hooded bulbs.
“Inside of half an hour now,” said he, “I ought to sight the first flash of the flares upon the parapet--the glow of the flaming well!”
And a singular eagerness all at once possessed him, a strange yearning to behold once more the strange, fog-shrouded, reeking City of the Lost People, almost as though it had been home, as though these white barbarians had been his own people.
Men! To see men once more! The idea leaped up and gripped him with a powerful fascination.
So it was that when in reality the first faint twinkle of the fishing-boats peeped through the mist--and beyond, a tiny necklace of gleaming points that he knew marked the walls of the town--his heart throbbed hotly and a cry of eager greeting welled from his soul.
Quickly the Pauillac swept him onward. Manœuvering cautiously, jockeying the great machine with that consummate skill he had acquired from long practice, he soon beheld the dim outlines of the vast cliff, the long walls, the dull reflections of the fire-plume, the slanting slope of beach.
And with keen exultation, thrilled with his triumph and his greeting to the Folk he came to rescue, he landed with a whir upon the reeking slope.
To him, even before he had been able to free his cramped body from the saddle, came swarming the people, with loud cries of welcome and rejoicing. Powerfully the automatics he and Beatrice had used in the Battle of the Walls had impressed their simple minds with almost superstitious reverence. More powerfully still his terrible fight with Kamrou, ending with the death of that great chief in the boiling vat. And now, acknowledging him their overlord and ruler, whom they had feared to lose forever, they trooped in wild, disordered throngs to do him reverence.
In from the sea, summoned by waving flares, the fishing-boats came plowing mightily, driven by many paddles in the hands of the strange, white-haired men.
Along the beach the townsfolk thronged, and down the causeway, beneath the vast monolithic plinth of the fortified gate, jostled and pushed an ever-growing multitude.